Topic: Security risks of BSV hardfork; Wright trying to add the same to Bitcoin (Read 413 times)

It might be incremental progress: First unwind the margin. Next delist.  Going straight to announcing delisting would complicate unwinding the margin as it might cause the price to drop out.


It's only prudent for anyone to keep their distance from these scammers.

Yeah, a fraction of the way there.  Long way to go.  All exchanges, webwallets, retailers, casinos, etc need to cut out that cancer completely. 

I also call again for a total boycott/embargo of any conferences or other events and gatherings with speakers representing BSV/Faketoshi.  That seems to be one of their sources of revenue.  No one in their right mind should be legitimising that crap.

I thought it's a (small) victory or a step towards normality, until I've read the last line: normal trading and also deposits still remain enabled...

https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/868

He already evaded arrest for a decade when he was on the DHS most wanted list... so that sounds challenging.

Unfortunately, there appears to be more than one highly wealthy person funding the operation too: https://nitter.it/agerhanssen/status/1593944235828559874#m

If I thought Ayre still believed that Wright was Satoshi there would be an opportunity to wake him up-- get someone trusted to send him  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-decades-long-relationship-with-his-biggest-client maybe.  I don't think he does now, if he ever really did, unfortunately.  I think he thinks he's Wright's partner in pulling the biggest heist ever.

Not dissimilar to how politicians like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson operated.  People made the mistake of dismissing them as mildly comical, bumbling clowns and it was perceived that they probably didn't pose much of a threat.  And their conduct was such a convincing distraction that no one was really paying attention to who was bankrolling them and what the real agendas were.  As such, they didn't get the opposition that, in hindsight, they clearly warranted.  But politicians are thankfully subject to some checks and balances.  Wright sadly isn't.  His only limit is the depth of Ayres' pockets.  So maybe we should focus on the source?  How do we take the fight to Ayres?  The one bankrolling the operation.

Your logic is exactly why getting the Bitcoin community to respond aggressively has been such a challenge: We all know that Wright doesn't have a serious chance of success in accomplishing his stated goal.  But that doesn't make him not a threat.

Even if he loses in court, he's still causing an large amount of time waste, stress, and cost.  And while he'll lose if the case is competently fought if it's not fought (or really incompetently) fought he will win, since that's just how courts work.  Now, Bitcoin doesn't need any specific developers to survive for sure, so you might not care if varrious people who helped make bitcoin what it is today are ruined over this, fine...  But over the long run there do need to be people who develop bitcoin: to keep it running with the latest software and operating systems, to fix new attacks that are discovered, to resolve bugs, etc.   If working on Bitcoin will get you sued by wright and left to take on all the cost by the community-- well no *sane* person will do that.  So what you'll  is fewer and fewer contributors and that ones you'll get will instead is people who aren't sane, people who are secretly working for Wright, etc.   This could have pretty bad consequences in the long run.

This isn't the only negative of effect of Wright's scamming. His efforts divert funding from people who would otherwise buy bitcoin and invest in the ecosystem into supporting Wright. His actions make the whole space look fraudulent.  His people meet with government officials and lobby for bad policy to harm Bitcoin. etc.

None of this stuff should be a concern *if* the community steps up and even resists it mildly.  But since Wright looks like such a pathetic clown people tend to dismiss him completely and fail to step up and resist it.  A foe doesn't have to be formidable to destroy you if you won't resist.

im not to worried, as an observer of CSW antics
lets play devils advocate
if he won judgement to breach human rights in regards to slavery of a dev. where a dev is forced to work for free to do CSW bidding of creating a bitcoin fork that allows his code..
that judgement alone just creates another altcoin...

however lets play further devils advocate and play out worse case scenario
it would also require not just breaching human rights act to force someone to work for free to do that.. but also separate judgements would be required to get the most economic nodes(exchanges) to be forced to run his altcoin node and list his altcoin on their exchanges and serves as "BTC"

without the economic node acceptance that the altcoin is the new bitcoin.. its just an altcoin

we just alert the community of another crap coin, existing.. and tell them to just move their real bitcoin to a fresh address . then use their now redundant private key to sweep and value they can snare off the crap coin and spend it before CSW does(free money for the community in ways of double spending a UTXO on his altcoin)

I agree that the Bitcoin community needs to be more proactive.

But I don't think filing more lawsuits against Wright will help (unless it's at a truly grand scale-- like hundreds of Bitcoin users harmed by Wright's bullshit suing him across dozens of jurisdictions)--  his marks are willing to provide seemingly boundless amounts of money for litigation (some have even suggested that one of the funders owns the lawfirm-- as thats now possible in the UK-- and is using the whole thing for laundering).  And Wright has already amply signaled that if he loses litigation he just won't pay:  He's already >140 million dollars in debt from florida, he's bragged about having no assets and being judgement proof, and he's bragged about his antiguan passport (which is how Ayre evaded arrest by the US for a decade).

The proactive response that may help is pressuring prosecutors to take action:  really only criminal prosecution will stop Wright at this point.  Even if he flees prosecution to antigua it'll probably stop the attacks via the courts and relegate him to spreading FUD on social media.

Another proactive response that may help is getting industry players to stop supporting BSV and Wright.  Every entity that supports or gives stage time to these scammers are adding credibility which they can leverage to get the professional support to keep their frivolous cases going in court.  Increasing public awareness of BSV's new lack of security and lack of cryptocurrency properties may help. 

ethics of abusing the court system is bad by doing a SLAPP, you are correct. but when it comes to who that multi direction slapp is aimed at. ethics are good to slap and slapp CSW

but with that said.
the main thing is being on the defence side of CSW slapps (of HIS claims to devs) is never a good position. as its being in reaction/response/target of CSW claims/questions.

EG depending on how he termed/worded a claim/question to prove his claim determines how you can respond/defend(limits what you can say). as your response becomes limited to HIS claim/question... where also no response/reaction is also a win for him..

the best defence is to counter.. to make a counter claim where you are then in control of the narrative more. as hodlonaut did, and good for him to do this
(being the plaintiff not defendant)

for instance the cobra case was a default paper loss for cobra simple because, by not reacting/responding the plaintiff wins by default
if cobra was someone that was open to doxing himself by counter suing CSW cobra cobra could have easily won..

Is the EFF getting involved in this at all? I can see this as being something that they would help fight in terms of the OSS.
Also, I know there was a legal donation fund for Hodlonaut is there a similar one for this?

What gets me is that there are a lot of big name people with a lot of funds who support crypto, and they just stand on the sidelines when things like this happen. I just don't understand why they don't put up some money.

-Dave

According to CMC, with their hyperinflated exchange volumes, BSV has a daily volume of about $55 million with a $750 million market cap. Lower metrics than BCH, SHIBA, Filecoin, Apecoin or Axie Infinity.

I seriously doubt that exchanges made any bets on BSV and use it as collateral, investment or in any vital financial product or department.
If all of this is indeed true and they "upgraded" the code with some backdoors all it will do is lose more worshippers and get delisted from those few exchanges that stil tolerate them.

The fact that they expect such code to be implemented into BTC is bonkers. Could a judge obligate open source devs to change the code ?

Regarding the lawsuits, I propose we make a coin and do a ICO to raise funds for future lawsuits.
Call it CWLF ( craig wright lawsuit fund) and list it on some exchanges.
And everytime he loses and will be obligated to pay damages the money will be used to buy the coins off the exchanges so price goes up and investors get some ROI. Rinse and repeat. The way I see it he will not stop going to court and we might as well get something out of it. Of course with the ones being sued receiving the most percet of CWLF Coins.

They could start with 100% transparency about all their costs and everything, then ask for donations. I am certain that the bitcoin community would be more than happy to respond. I personally would make a donation to such a cause.

Besides, don't we have lawyers amongst bitcoin hodlers already? There should be some and they should bury CSW under lawsuits and make an example of him so that in the future nobody dares to repeat such attacks against Bitcoin or open source community in general.

IF unorganised, yes it could cost people alot.. but..

people could SLAPP CSW back
(disclaimer, only in areas that dont have anti-slapp/anti-frivolous rules)

imagine we had 1000 people in 1000 different counties/states of different  countries.. meaning 1 person per county/court

each person without seeking a lawyer. just filed a claim in their local court against CSW.. not really wanting/caring about it going anywhere(not wanting it to go to trial)
..
CSW would then have to use his lawyers to try to quash 1000 claims. before any of them go to a hearing/ trial.

it costs each person very little just to file. but costs CSW lawyers fee's per case x 1000
...
also to note.. being the claimant/plaintiff means you have control of the agenda/questions... where as being on the defence means you are a responder and at the whims of the claim. where the claimant can make demands/actions..

its always best to be a claimant and not on the defence

The legal cost of defending his many accusations is also high and would likely cower many into silence rather than challenging his lies.

Couldn't find muh recent information on the case, besides a failed attempt by CSW to have it "struck out".

There was/is at least one lawsuit against CSW, initiated by COPA, but afaik the topic there is only the copyright on the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Maybe more will come after that one is won (and the legal costs recovered).

I've always wanted to ask; rather than being reactive to the accusations and suits made by CSW, why not the Bitcoin community be proactive and sue first? If there are civil cases accusing him of impersonation and forgery, couldn't that limit how much cases he can create?
Has this been done before?

I doubt they would, and if they did, there would be a limit to how much they can squeeze out to support law suits.

This is worrisome, but I hope that if it's the case, larger pockets - MicroStrategy, Grayscale, COPA - would chip in. This would at least help Bitcoin (and those companies' investments).
But indeed, if we get there, open source may also be badly (and sadly) affected. That's not OK. Well, all this is not OK. I still fail to understand how can any country's legal system take serious CSW. Maybe Hodlonaut's case can be referenced though from now on for a bit of background...

Issues like this BSV backdoor present a general risk to users of exchanges that support BSV (Robinhood and Bitfinex being the two best known)--  if the backdoor ends up making these exchanges significantly insolvent with respect to the BSV customers it's likely that customer assets will be pooled in a bankruptcy creating risk for customers prudent enough to not touch BSV.

Some additional context that isn't in the article is that the same fraudster is using a dozen current and former open source volunteer Bitcoin Developers demanding that they publish Bitcoin software with an equivalent backdoor or pay him billions of dollars in damages.

We defeated the lawsuit in a pretrial action with the UK courts denying jurisdiction on the basis that the case had no serious chance of success.  He sought permission to appeal and unfortunately it was granted.  So the case appeal will be heard starting December 7th.

I think the case has concerning implications far beyond Bitcoin: if case law in the UK is established that OSS developers can be sued, forced to take on on millions of UKP in legal costs, because a user demands a backdoor be introduced because they claim they suffered losses at no fault of the developers, in spite of the unambiguous MIT expat disclaimer of liabilities, even years after they stopped working on the software (as is the case for me, for example)... then that is bad news for open source in general.

Mr. Wright's demands are particular absurd and his facts particular deficient, since they're all predicated on his obviously falsified history of Bitcoin usage.  If his case can escape summary judgement than pretty much any well funded case could.

It's important as open source developers that such frivolous cases can be discharged at the earliest possible juncture to prevent the legal costs from being personally ruinous.

https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoin-sv-hardfork-significant-security-risks/